Author Scot C. Taylor shares the final excerpt from his new book Luck or Grace: The Intersect INTERSECT SUPREME
The basic premise of the “The Intersect” is a root understanding that life itself is to be valued. That life here on this planet is something to be cherished and enjoyed. To employ all of the riches of our being including the sense of touch, sense of smell, sense of sight, sense to hear, and sense of taste. Your life has its “one of kind,” “unbelievable,” “never happen again,” “most beautiful,” and“once-in-a-lifetime” happenings.
Take a minute and jot down your great moments. For this humble scribe, they include my first kiss and the appreciation of touch, and my mother’s cooking, which gave the sense of taste. I loved her lasagna made from a recipe passed down from my grandmother. Just bringing that meal to memory makes me hungry for Italian. Or the aroma of the pine trees in the Sierras. The touch of the baby-soft hair of my first-born daughter. Seeing my wife in her wedding dress, ready to say her vows over the Pacific Ocean in Palos Verdes, California, makes the ability to see so precious. Hearing my son yell “Dad” when he was lost and missing at the beach for hours. (Chasing sand crabs, mind you.)
Look backwards as far as you can and list the pleasure and pain that your life has afforded you.
Notice how little control you have had over those events… My list of cognitive memories of the joy life has brought me cannot be held in the volume of this book. In the introduction I highlighted the loss of home, businesses, and being raised as a “latchkey”kid of divorced parents, complete with clothes and shoes with holes and stains. All of these disappointments cannot compare to the joy.
Death of this body, which holds our spirit captive, is also to be looked forward to with great anticipation. To have a life everlasting without pain, suffering, dying, or crying. The intersect for you and I is ultimately at birth and death – the supreme intersect of luck or blessing. You had no power over your birth and you have no power over your death. The how, what, when, and where of your life has always been and always will be out of your control. But you can choose whom you will serve.
You can, and have already done so, either live your life under the oppression of a faceless benefactor called luck, the great adversary to grace; or live for Grace, the Merciful Creator of the universe. Choosing God is choosing grace, and grace affords all the promises of your earthly life and afterlife. All that happens, happens for God’s benefit and yours.
Luck is always true to itself. It has made no claims to happiness, peace, love, or joy. It pledges nothing in death. Your death, as a believer in superstition, will be considered a sad, unlucky event, as luck only lives in a material world. When you die all hope is lost and all probability is expired. Luck speaks only to possessions coming your way.
Napoleon Hill and The Secret preach that you can“will” good fortune. Ok then. I would like to will that I will never die, or that upon death I will ascend to a celestial planet, created for me with all my heart’s desires and lavish dreams with no moral or ethical consequences. Well, we have already read how limited we are when it comes to birth and death.
I am certain we would create chaos; I know I would, and with the chaos I created be left stranded in the wish with no more left. It’s amazing how great we think we are yet no scientist can even create a single seed. A seed. A simple life-giving element, preprogrammed from germination to death.
Believing in anything but grace is an illusion and escape from our human weakness. After all, we have not even been trusted to keep ourselves alive, as we have been created with involuntary organ functions. There is only one choice to make on your intersect’s past, present, and future: shall you believe in grace or luck? It’s one or the other. It’s my conclusion, regardless of the short-term pain or suffering, success or failure that I might have, it is better to live my life for a known God who promises to love me.
It’s lunacy to wager your eternal life, if it exists, to anything other than an identifiable benefactor, and the author of grace. After all, with luck I have no hope of everlasting life, and with God’s grace, at least I have the hope of it. Somehow you were in the intersect to have found this writing. That alone suggests that there is a search for truth or at least to find a confirmation of your belief.
And so, when you find yourself alone, when the doors are closed and you are in your chambers, office, bedroom, or perhaps a jail cell, the accident can happen. When you lest expect it as you can not anticipate it, you jam your toenail and your knee jerk yelp is “God d#% it” or just “f#%&”. That you, instead, say, “Thank you God, it could have been broken” or “Luck d#% it.”
And if you think that example is not apropos, then consider Bob Marley. Mr. Marley, instead of his lifestyle of drugs and alcohol bearing the final random number of his last second here on earth, died of an infected toenail. I leave you with a song that has been sung by every church in the world, written in 1725, fifty-one years before the United States was created.
If you have been to a funeral of someone who died as a Christian or simply had a Christian ceremony, or maybe a U2 concert, you have heard the words. I trust this reading will plant a seed of faith in grace in your spirit, provide water and food for it to grow and flourish before your “number is up.” The unseen forces of grace are at work, and its Creator is waiting patiently for you to invite Him in.
Amazing Grace
Amazing Grace! how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.
T’was Grace that taught my heart to fear,
and Grace my fears relieved.
How precious did that Grace appear
The hour I first believed!
– John Newton (1725-1807)
Make this your song today or have it sung by a group of people, in and out of tune, gathered around – memorializing your life of Luck, singing about a place you will not go and a Grace you have not known! God said, “I will have mercy upon those that I will have mercy, I will have compassion upon those that I will have compassion.” Romans 9:14.
See part two of this encouraging series of excerpts Luck or Grace – The Intersect Part Two
Scot C. Taylor is a career entrepreneur with successful startups in advertising, publishing, fast food, and consulting sectors. Mr. Taylor was a fellow Co-Founder/Director Marketing of Looking Good Calendars USC’s poster boy’s in the 80’s, Co-founder/Director of Operation Health Hut Inc., North America’s first natural fast food restaurant; and founder/CEO of Outdoor Advertising Systems, Inc. (OAS), North America’s first and master leaseholder of advertising on lunch trucks. Mr. Taylor is the active CEO of OAS and his marketing and consulting firm, Fortune II, Inc. He resides in Laguna, California with his wife of 20 plus years. To learn more about Scot C. Taylor’s new book, visit Luck or Grace
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